With everyone back to school, I thought now would be as good a time as any to celebrate the contributions of teachers. This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll have music from four films about extraordinary teachers.
Where else to start but with the sentimental classic “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” (1939)? Robert Donat, in his Oscar-winning role, is the aging teacher and eventual headmaster of a British boarding school. Greer Garson is the transformative love of his life. The composer was Richard Addinsell – he of the “Warsaw Concerto” fame. For the film, Addinsell created a “Brookfield School” song, which features prominently.
Mr. Chips’ influence extends well beyond the generations of appreciative students he taught. In fact, fifty years later, filmmakers were still returning to the “Chips paradigm” to move and inspire audiences.
Personally, I have a lot of problems with “Dead Poets Society” (1989), Peter Weir’s beautiful, but shallow take on the transformative powers of poetry. The film pays lip service to poetry’s life-altering potential, but then fails to credibly support its assertions. Instead – for me, anyway – it comes across as pretentious and manipulative. “Chips” may have pushed some buttons, but at least it earned the right.
Robin Williams’ classroom lessons are entertaining, and the cinematography is beautiful, making me wish I were in private school. But “Dead Poets Society” is too literal. Nothing about it is transcendent or elevating, in a way Walt Whitman, whom the screenplay repeatedly invokes, would have recognized. For me, it just failed to “seize the day.” Audiences seem to love it, though, so who am I to criticize? The music is by Maurice Jarre.
We’ll take a rather ambitious field trip to the Soviet Union then, for “Alone” (1931), which tells the tale of a young teacher, who imagines she’s about to be assigned to a class of neat, obedient, city schoolchildren. Instead, she is sent to work in Siberia, where she faces some understandably daunting challenges.
The film’s score is by none other than Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich was very active in the cinema, from the time he was a teenager, actually playing piano in a movie theater. He went on to write original music for some 40 films, most of it sadly neglected, especially in the West.
Finally, “Mr. Chips” is updated for the ’90s, in the Richard Dreyfuss film “Mr. Holland’s Opus” (1995). Dreyfuss plays a high school music teacher who faces a number of personal setbacks over the years, yet quietly manages to influence the lives of his students, while denying his private ambitions as a composer.
It’s another unabashed button-pusher, yet the film possesses a certain sincerity that’s lacking in “Dead Poets Society.” It does, however, have one fatal flaw. When Mr. Holland’s “opus” – the so-called symphony he has worked on his entire life – is finally heard at the end of the film, it is woefully unconvincing. Instead, we’ll enjoy selections from the film’s underscore, which is by Michael Kamen.
It’s worth mentioning that, in 1996, Kamen established The Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation, to support music education through the donation of new and refurbished musical instruments to underserved school and community programs and individual students, a beautiful gesture.
Okay, class dismissed. We’ll reconvene at 6:00 EDT. Attendance will be taken on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
